


Small Talk

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexuality, Blowjobs, Drugs, F/M, M/M, NASA, White Party, explicit for later chapters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-23 09:54:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23009647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Boyd works for NASA. Or, he's trying to, if they didn't pull funding on his project and give him no excuse to avoid being dragged to Miami for the weekend. Raylan is hunting a fugitive during the city's biggest party week of the year.They're both working through some stuff, even before they bump into each other.
Relationships: Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens
Comments: 22
Kudos: 99





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to Mangacat, who commented on another one of my fics a mild interest in seeing Raylan/Boyd Miami White Party shenanigans and I ran with it like the wild animal I am.

In the summer of 2010, NASA’s Constellation Program is cancelled and by extension, the launch of the uncrewed Orion MPCV is delayed indefinitely. 

Boyd sort of saw it coming. They’d gone over-budget four times, twice during construction. Just a few minutes before quitting time on Friday, the team gets a call from the director of the KSC that their Hail Mary appeal to the president for the finances needed to get the damn thing in the air has, unsurprisingly, failed. 

People are mostly quiet, squeezing each other’s arms, gathering their things to go home. Disappointment, yes, but mostly exhaustion. People who work at NASA don’t tend to stay crushed for long. They’ll drink, they rant to their husbands and wives and sleep in late tomorrow. By Monday, they’ll be back to regroup. They’ll be fine.

Two hours after the news comes down, Boyd’s the only one left in the office, absently writing to-do lists as the sun starts to sink over Eastern Florida. The quiet is a little eerie after so many days of bustling activities, but he’s okay. Comfortable, even. 

Until Tim knocks on the door and enters before actually receiving permission to enter.

Tim works over at Canaveral, an Air Force veteran training other physically perfect specimens in spaceflight. Boyd likes him okay, he’s pretty funny and almost as good at Scrabble as him, but he’s really not in the mood for company. Especially when Tim starts talking about weekend plans, how he and a couple buddies from college – the way he says _buddies_ , Boyd can tell he slept with all of them at least once – are headed down to Miami, got into some really exclusive White Party thing, a huge soiree to kick off the whole week of events. And he wants Boyd to tag along.

He's certain that if Tim didn’t know he was queer, he wouldn’t always be inviting him to things like this. Boyd never really broadcast going both ways – a childhood in Kentucky and two tours in Kuwait taught him to keep that information close to the vest – but they’d bumped into each other at a gay bar years back and he’d seen no reason to lie. Tim took it as a declaration of deep trust and appointed himself the one to keep Boyd in touch with the gay community of Florida, even during the times when he wasn’t signed with that team. 

Boyd is not going to the White Party. He’s not in the mood to drive three hours down the coast and more importantly, he’s not twenty-two years old. 

“That’s condescending.” Tim says.

“It’s God's truth. A weeklong bacchanal for barely legal hustlers to get themselves a fresh case of gonorrhea,” Boyd says.

“It’s for charity.” Tim argues. “Madonna goes every year, and she’s like a hundred.”

He makes a note on his legal pad. “Another way I’ll never live up to Madonna. How ever will I soldier on?”

“It’s for AIDS. Do you _like_ AIDS?”

“I am not gonna dignify that with a response.” He can’t seem to stop writing. His brain’s been running towards the finish line on this project every day for almost four years. If he just _stops_ thinking about next steps all at once, he might actually die. The other engineers tease him for doing all his preliminary calculations on paper, but he’s an analog guy, always works best if he can use his hands. If they let him, he’d be soldering the pieces of the rocket together himself. 

The rocket that he is not allowed to see actually do the one thing he _designed_ it to do because the goddamn government decided to slash their budget and give it to...what? Defense? National Parks? Did America really need more goddamn trees?

He grips his pencil so hard it cracks. Tim pulls the pieces out of his hand, concerned. “Despite your admirable focus, you do know you’re not going to be able to single handedly get the date moved back up, right?”

It’s been a long few months, the whole team working around the clock, like pure sweat would stop the sword of Damocles from swinging down on them. Boyd fell asleep in his office twice, woke up with the imprint of a stapler on his face. “I could use a strong drink.”

Tim’s face brightens. “Yes. Yes! We’ll get some sun, a cocktail or six...”

“I have alcohol in my home.”

Tim actually sits down on the edge of his desk, which must mean he really wants this, because everyone knows how Boyd reacts to an invasion of personal space. “You know what else you have in your home? Emptiness. Regret.”

“Good Lord, boy. You know we ain’t that close, right?”

“Look, you’ve had a tough year with this funding bullshit, plus Ava-“ Boyd snaps his teeth. A reflexive move that does the job scaring Tim off nonetheless. “Point being, wallowing isn’t good for you.”

“I am not wallowing, Timothy, I am thirty-six. Thirty-six year old men go to the privacy of their own domiciles after work and drink alone."

“You realize you’re not doing that either? You’re sitting in your office at 7pm on a Friday night! You can’t let what happened knock you out of the game forever.”

Boyd glares at him, but he's already thinking about the last time he went back to his apartment before dark. The last time he had sex. The last time he spent the night doing anything but working or writing long letters to Ava he’d never send.

Maybe it has been a tough year. 

Tim leans in. “In Miami, you can trash talk about the federal government as loud as you want and it won’t get back to nobody.”

Boyd pushes his glasses up to rub the bridge of his nose. His resolve is collapsing. “I ain’t going to those parties. I’m bringing my books and y’all are leaving me alone on the beach.”

“Oh, but men just go wild for that sunny disposition,” Tim deadpans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Constellation Program really was cancelled in 2010 and the Orion shuttles are cool as shit and y'all really shouldn't have given me access to a character who is also a closet space nerd.


	2. Chapter 2

The drive to Miami is trying as Boyd predicted. He pretends to forget the names of Tim’s two college friends – sun-kissed, muscled cliches in shorts – so he doesn’t have to participate in their conversation about which clubs they should hit after the party. Tim keeps glancing at him in the passenger’s seat, clearly annoyed. Boyd told him this is what he was getting. 

He answers a few more work emails on his phone, obsesses over his weather maps – did the team out of Columbia launch any weather balloons this month? The sky looks perfect – and aimlessly opens and shuts apps. The guy he’s pretending he doesn’t know is named Brian glances over his shoulder, points at the phone.

“Ooh, she’s pretty.” 

His phone background is still a picture of Ava, laughing on his living room floor. They’d been a little too drunk, which made Boyd's motormouth work double time. His increasingly physical explanation of how centrifugal force worked made Ava laugh so hard she lost air. Head thrown back, both hands clapped over her mouth, a ratty old flannel slipping off her shoulder. He was so in love with her that night, in that moment, he thought he would be crushed under the weight of it and die happy.

He clicked the phone screen off. “She’s ‘bout the reason bodies were invented.” 

Brian laughs, discomfort leaking through. Boyd can feel himself getting another side-eye and hunches over, pretends to be enthralled in the fantasy audiobook Tim insisted on playing. (It's not long before he actually is. He'll get into almost any book if he's bored enough. In juvie, he read the first three volumes of _The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire_.)

Just a few minutes outside city limits, traffic slows to a halt. Milo, Tim’s other friend, sticks half his torso out the window, squinting into the distance. He's liable to get his head sliced off, if the cars were moving more than a few inches at a time.

“There’s like, a police barricade up there. Look at the lights.”

Boyd’s entire body tenses, coiling, ready to spring at a second’s notice. It takes a second for his brain to catch up with him, remember who he is now, that nobody is expecting him to fight his way out of this one. He scratches at the faded stick-and-poke tattoos on his knuckles, closes his eyes so he doesn't have watch the red-and-blue flashing.

* * *

“Unless you’ve got a better idea, this is what we’re doing,” Rachel says, before Raylan can even comment on the massive traffic jam. Just off his face. 

“Not suggesting that,” He says, getting out of his car and adjusting his hat in the bright sunlight. “Just think Anastazja Nowak is smart enough not to skip town on one of the state’s major highways in Friday night traffic.” 

The corner of Rachel's mouth twitches up, the way it does when she agrees with him but doesn’t want anyone to hear her admit it. She and Raylan were both Bible Belt transplants – her Tennessee, him Kentucky – and they tried not to be to buddy-buddy at work, not after someone from the FBI had nicknamed them the Hillbilly Squad.

She nudges one of the barricades aside to let him through. State police waved cars through one-by-one after they were cleared, most full of irritated looking tourists. “I don’t know, all these boys coming in for the White Party, good week to get lost in the chaos.”

Raylan surveys the shuttered eight lanes, thousands of people clogging the way in and out of town. Rachel has a point. “And now the chaos is gonna be cranky from sitting in traffic.”

A car inching close to the checkpoint has a huge Air Force sticker on the bumper, three men loudly snarking at each other over a loud audiobook. Raylan sees a fourth, though, crunched up in the passenger's seat, the look he’s giving the Staties sharp enough to be a glare. It’s not one of Nowak’s men, too skinny, no visible Polish gang tattoos, but he looks so familiar. Where has he… 

“Everything okay?” Rachel asks, following his line of sight. Raylan snaps back to himself, realizes he’s been staring. 

“Yeah. Just thought I saw someone I knew.” He turns his back to the grinding traffic. “Want to leave the gatekeeping to the uniforms?”

Rachel nods. “I got a tip from a CI that Nowak keeps a lot of her money off the books at her brother’s house on the beach.”

“There a chance she’ll try to swing by there?”

She shrugs. “We froze her accounts, only way she’s getting out of here is if she gets to that money.” Rachel starts back towards the car and he falls in step behind her. “I’ll put into the judge for a warrant. You want to keep an eye on his street until then?” 

“Sounds like a plan.” He walks around the car to open Rachel’s door for her. She rolls her eyes, but lets him, sliding into the passenger’s seat. 

“Good. Your pretty face will fit in much better over there than mine.” He looks down questioningly, and she smiles. “You’ll see.”

He pulls the car around the barricades and they speed down the highway that's nearly empty after them. He doesn’t mind stakeouts, isn’t nearly as fidgety as people assume someone with his hair-trigger is. Besides, Nowak’s family is loaded, through both legitimate and suspect means, so her brother’s house is sure to be right one the beach. He can get an ice cream, watch the waves and beautiful women in bikinis while he waits. 

Raylan supposes he needed to readjust to being alone, anyway. 

The thought barely passes through his mind before he turns on the radio to chase it out of his head. He’s glad Rachel can’t hear how maudlin he’s being. 

In his unmarked car, it takes almost an hour to find parking close enough to keep a watch on the Nowak mansion – backyard running into the ocean, as expected – because of the crowds. Some skinny kid in a white satin vest tries to valet it for him and he has to flash his badge to be left alone. 

“Sorry sir,” he squeaks, looking pale. “Look like you’re a guest.”

Raylan raises his eyebrows. “Now, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be insulted by that or not.” The boy was already five steps away. Raylan crosses his ankles, takes another look at the crowd. Less women in polka-dots, more men. A lot of them, actually, all wearing white clothes against harshly tanned skin. “Hey–” he waved out the window, stopping the kid in his tracks. “The hell is going on in there?”

“Adi Kowak hosts a big cocktail party the first night of the all White Party stuff,” the kid said.

“Looks pretty classy.” He’s lived Miami awhile, he knows for most local PD this week is just breaking up fights and scooping up drunks who overdo it at the raves, not valet service. The kid shrugs, jogs off to an approaching BMW. Maybe the Kowaks arranged this on purpose, a dignified event the cops wouldn't look twice at during a week like this. Anastazja could sneak into the house, get her money and get gone before anyone made it to their second G&T. 

Raylan puts his phone in his pocket, pats his holster, and gets out of the car. Rachel doesn’t have to know he passed through before the warrant did.

* * *

Loathe as he is to admit it, the party isn't as bad as Boyd expected. 

He’s not the only one in a button-up and long pants, and there’s no strobe lights or jello shots. Waitresses in white waistcoats flit through the beach house with trays of generous martinis. Someone's playing the piano somewhere. 

“So? Thoughts, you grumpy asshole?” Tim asks, rubbing Boyd’s shoulders like a coach psyching a boxer up for a fight. 

“It’s just fancy enough to make me feel insecure.” 

Tim grins, smacks his back encouragingly. “Knew you’d like it. Look, Brian didn’t want to pay for the valet and I gotta go check he hasn’t smashed up my car trying to parallel park. You gonna be okay here?”

Boyd grabs a martini off one of the passing trays, takes a big swig. “I will manage.”

“Good man. I will be right back.” Tim looks too serious, like he’s making a blood pact. Like he doesn’t trust Boyd isn’t going to hail a taxi right back to work the second his back is turned. Boyd takes another sip, forces a big smile. This is enough to convince Tim, and he darts off to rescue his car. 

Boyd takes his drink out onto the deck. It’s empty but for him at this early hour. Miami is a horrible place to see the stars, even with such a wide open view like this. Still, the land is nice. The sand is white and clean out to the surf, no sign of umbrellas or forgotten children’s toys marring the surface. 

“Shit, he’s got a private beach too?” Someone laughs behind him. He finishes the rest of the martini in one – _Lord_ , that’s strong – and turns to the noise. It’s a man, fiftyish with salt and pepper hair, a linen suit that shows off his chest hair. “Something funny?”

The man smiles gently, joins him leaning on the deck. “You are real Southerner. What is that accent? Alabama? The Carolinas?” 

“Kentucky.” The man is not Southern, not even American. He’s got an Eastern European tint in his words. He draws a waitress out, tells her to make them two fresh drinks, use his personal vermouth. Boyd is torn between wanting to roll his eyes at such posturing and being a little jealous he doesn't have the resources to pull a move like that. 

“That is refreshing. Everyone around here is a transplant from the North, turn this place into a party town.” 

“You don’t strike me as a local either,” Boyd says. The man grins, holds out his hand.

“I am Adi Kowak. You are here alone?” 

Fuck it. Boyd shakes it. “Let's see how good your booze is before I tell you all the sordid details of my life.” 

Adi grins, and for the first time Boyd wonders if this is what people are getting at when they tell _him_ he’s got too many teeth.

* * *

It shouldn’t have been this hard for anyone to find a single woman in a crowd full of men, much less a federal marshal.

The fact that the federal marshal is Raylan, and he looks the way Raylan does, seems to be slowing down the search a little.

“Please tell me you’re not a Cowboys fan,” says one man, nodding at the horseshoe ring on his left hand. Raylan smiles politely. 

“Less the team, more the concept.” 

“Well, the hat gave that away. I’m Tim.” He’s not bad looking. If he was off the clock, if he ever indulged this part of himself… 

“Hello Tim. I...must be on my way.” Raylan sidesteps him, walks towards the stairs. There’s a chain across the bottom landing, a cheery sign telling guests to stay downstairs. He steps over it and takes the steps three at time. There’s a wraparound balcony on the second floor of the beach house. It could give him a good vantage point to spot Anastazja if she’s on the grounds.

The beach is empty, the only people going out of the building are staff. He hears a snatch of conversation, the sharp, accented sound of Polish. He leans over the balcony, looks down onto the deck. 

It’s not Anastazja; there are only two men down there, leaning into each other, empty martini glasses on the ledge. The Polish accent pops up again, from the older man. Adi, the brother. Raylan turns to go back in, continue his search indoors, but the younger one, around his age, catches his eye. He's wearing combat boots at a cocktail party. They're not all that dirty or scuffed, but still. 

There’s that feeling again. He _knows_ him, he _knows_ that face, who–

He tilts too far, and his hat catches the wind, pulls off his head and flutters down to the deck below. Both men look up, see him hanging over the railing, hand stretched down in a futile gesture to catch it. _Goddammit._

“You have a little too much to drink?” Adi Nowak’s town is light, but his eyes are narrowing. “Careful friend, the night is still–”

“Shit, _Raylan Givens_?” Boyd Crowder, a little drunk, shouts his name loud enough for them to hear in Palm Beach.


	3. Chapter 3

Raylan’s run into a lot of strange characters in his years as a Marshal. Eccentric family members of fugitives, minor celebrities, snake handlers and party clowns. He even got a tip from a pair of nuns a while back. 

If you let him guess for twenty-four hours straight, though, he never would’ve predicted he’d find Boyd Crowder looking up at him from a beach house deck in Miami. 

“Hello,” he says, because no other options seem to reach his mouth. 

Adi’s eyes harden further. He recognizes him. That means he’s in touch with his sister, knows to be on the lookout for the Marshal service, the man in the hat. Raylan ducks back inside, races down the back stairs as fast as he can without looking suspicious. 

The throng of party guests on the first floor is much thicker now. In the foyer, he can see the man who flirted with him, Tim, running out of space to move. Raylan forces his way towards the deck with his shoulders, but he’s too late to contain anyone (or get his hat). 

They’re both back inside the airy living room. Adi scans the crowd. He’s got a hand on the small of Boyd’s back, a lazy smile on his face to assuage any worries. Boyd, to his credit, still looks a little perplexed. 

Adi leans into Boyd’s ear, murmurs something Raylan can’t make out from across the room, and darts off into the crowd, disappearing in seconds flat. Shit. He waits a beat, watches that he doesn’t double back, before working his way towards Boyd. 

He looks pretty much the same as when they were kids; wild hair, self-serious expression. The pressed white button-up tucked into dark jeans is new. On his knuckles, there’s faded tattoos that spell out _FUCK YU UP_. An inopportune laugh bubbles up in Raylan’s throat.

“God Almighty, it _is_ you. I thought I was having myself a stroke,” Boyd says, eyebrows raised almost off his face. He grabs Raylan’s arm and pulls him into a half-hug, patting his back twice and stepping back. “You’re looking real good.”

“Hey, Boyd.” Raylan gives him a tight smile, still very aware he doesn’t have eyes on either Kowak. “What did that man just say to you?”

Boyd laughs, sways a little in his grip. “You know, I’m having a little trouble recalling. Something to the effect of dealing with a family matter. The hell are you doing here?” 

Raylan only counted three empty martini glasses on the ledge of the deck. There’s a good chance Boyd can’t hold his liquor like he did back in the holler – they’re all getting older – but his eyes look too glassy for gin to be the sole culprit. 

Before he can investigate further, Boyd’s pitches forward, catching himself against Raylan’s chest. He looks up and starts laughing. “Now, I had no idea you had an inclination towards men. We could’ve had a lot of fun, back in the day.” 

It’s not easy to make Raylan go pink, but the comment gets him awfully close. “Why don’t you get yourself a coffee? I have to–”

“Give it another month and I’ll have all of Harlan County knocking on my door,” he mumbles, inches from Raylan’s chin, shaking his head. 

It occurs to Raylan that maybe Boyd _can’t_ stand up on his own in the same moment Boyd surges forward and kisses him. 

Soft, closed-mouth. The way you kiss in the seventh grade, or when you and your ex-wife are feeling particularly amicable. Raylan kisses back, because...because that’s what you do, when someone kisses you, hanging onto you like a life raft. It’s automatic as exhaling. 

It’s gentle. He didn’t know Harlan had left any gentleness left in either of them. 

Boyd laughs against his mouth, and for a sickening second Raylan feels caught out, like he’s nineteen and on the wrong end of a practical joke. Time and place is wobbling around him. But Boyd keeps laughing, a little hysterical, pitched high. Raylan pulls back, their foreheads knocking together. 

“Boyd, did you take something?”

Still laughing, Boyd wags his index finger. “Now Raylan, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration frowns upon recreational drug use.” A pause, working something out in his head. “That being said, I do seem to be experiencing the effects of ketamine. How did that come to pass?”

Fuck. Now he definitely needs to find Adi. He loops an arm around Boyd’s waist, walks them to a nearby couch before he can really think about what he’s doing.

“You, don’t move. I need to make a call.” He’s hoping Rachel’s in a soft-hearted mood today, that the sight of his drugged high school... _something_ might lessen the amount of shit this excursion has stirred up. Boyd leans on his shoulder, eyes darting to Raylan’s holster. 

“Forgive the cliche, but is that a Glock in your pocket? Or are you just–”

“U.S. Marshals, everybody down on the ground!” Rachel’s voice cuts through the din, followed by the sound of multiple heavy shoes clattering by the front door. 

Raylan sees Tim, immediately go tense and back himself against a wall, hands on his head. Boyd moves similarly, even in his haze, sliding onto the ground and staying low, eyes bouncing between Raylan and the half-dozen other agents spreading through the room, in matching navy windbreakers. He realizes veterans and criminals and people who grew up like they did all react to trouble the same way. Hit the dirt, get ready to spring.

“Deputy Marshal Givens?” Art is bustling through the crowd. His voice is level, authoritative, but his eyes are more than a little irritated. He and Rachel round the corner, guns raised, and the look gets a little more confused when he sees Boyd against his leg. 

It’s even harder to make Boyd turn red than Raylan, but this manages to do it.

* * *

Kissing someone new, after Ava, was always going to be rough. Kissing someone while intoxicated against his own volition was rougher. Kissing Raylan Givens, Raylan from _Harlan,_ who wasn’t even a man of his persuasion but there on federal assignment was about the roughest Boyd could take without wanting to stand under the exhaust pipes of a rocket. 

“Do you want more water?” Tim asks. They’re sitting on the back steps of the deck, the rest of the party guests being questioned and then cleared out. A black woman in a Marshal windbreaker called in EMTs who gave Boyd ipecac and made him vomit until they were satisfied they’d gotten all the Special K out of his system. Puking his guts out all over Adi’s fancy bathroom sink afforded him a grim sort of satisfaction, at least. 

“I don’t want more water, Timothy. I want to go home.”

He nods grimly, claps a hand on the back of his neck. Boyd tries not to cringe. He doesn’t want pity. He’s a grown man, and a prickly one at that, and now he feels stupid he didn’t notice anything was amiss. Boyd Crowder doesn’t let criminal adjacent men – let _anyone_ – get the drop on him. 

“I’m never gonna be able to get you out of the office again, am I?” Tim asks.

“Not a snowball’s chance in hell.” Tim worries his lip, looking so remorseful it almost makes Boyd mad. He pulls them both into standing. “Y’all stay, have fun. I’ll rent a car back.”

“But–”

“I want to be alone.” 

They walked into the house. Raylan was leaning against the back of the couch, talking with the black woman and an older man who was scolding him with the tone of a boss. He caught sight of Boyd and nodded to him. Something cringed in his stomach, dangerously akin to shame.

No. He was Boyd Crowder. He was in control of himself. He decided he wasn’t going to be embarrassed. 

“Feeling better?” Raylan asks. 

Boyd nods. “Nothing a sleeve of saltine crackers can’t fix.” 

Raylan smiles mildly, taking Boyd’s breezing past their earlier interaction in stride. “Glad to hear it.”

“Mr. Crowder?” The woman says. “I’m Deputy Marshal Rachel Brooks. We need to talk to you about your interactions with Adi Kowak earlier today.”

“Jesus,” Tim says. “He’s had a rough one, can’t you call him in a couple days?”

Boyd shakes his head. “Tim, it’s fine.” A warning glare that he better stop trying to baby him, and Tim raises both hands in surrender, backing off. 

“That your boyfriend?” Raylan asks, looking more amused than anything. Boyd rolls his eyes.

“Decidedly not.” Rachel settles them all on the living room furniture, and Boyd makes sure to sit perfectly upright.


	4. Chapter 4

C-R-O-W-D-E-R. No, he doesn’t know the origin of that, probably English. No, he doesn’t have a middle name. Yes, that is a little odd. Who knows why, you’d have to take it up with his mama. 

The feds are nicer than the times he was on the other side of a crime, chatting through his intake information to put him at ease, but Boyd still finds it tedious. Is knowing his birthday really going to fix all of this? 

Raylan and he were born sixteen days apart, beginning and end of June. He wonders how much of the form he could fill in, from memory. 

He’s trying not to watch him leaning against the fireplace, hands on those slim hips. 

“And do you live here in Miami?” Rachel asks, ignoring his weary tone as she goes down her list. 

“No ma’am, I’m up in Orlando.”

“Occupation?”

He rubs his palms on his kneecaps. “I am a mechanical engineer at the Kennedy Space Center.” 

Rachel pauses. The whole room does, actually. The boss – Art, he said – looks up from the spot on the floor he was examining, genuine confusion flashing across his face. 

Raylan _laughs_.

“I’m sorry, you implying you work for _NASA_ , Boyd?”

Boyd lets his boots fall flat against the floor, likes the loud _thump_ they make as he leans forward. “I don’t recall any implying involved in my previous sentence, _Raylan._ I stated it as fact. Which it is.” 

Fuck him, thinking he gets to be the arbitrator of what is and isn’t possible for people like them. He glares, hard lipped, and Raylan holds his gaze, trying to make him break, admit he’s fucking with him. Boyd pushes his steel-toes harder into the ground, 

Art breaks the awkward silence. “Deputy Givens, would you like to inform me on how you two know each other?”

Boyd thinks for a moment Raylan’s going to deny anything of the sort. Anger still buzzing in his veins, he’s going to deny he came from the same place as someone apparently so worthy of being dismissed. 

Eyes still locked, Raylan says, “Boyd and I dug coal together.” 

Art leans into Boyd. In a conspiratorial tone still loud enough for all to hear, he asks, “You a Kentucky boy too? Thank God one of you has a brain."

Rachel laughs, and there’s a little more air in the room. Boyd lets himself fall back against the couch, releasing the tension in his shoulders. He’s not–this isn’t him. This _can't_ be him.

“Okay, rocketman,” Raylan says, still watchful. “Let’s talk about Adi Kowak. How long were the two of you out on the deck?”

Boyd crosses his arms, trying to shake some clear moments from the last day. Annoyingly, smashing his face against Raylan’s seems to be the sharpest in his mind. “About an hour, maybe hour and a half.”

Rachel makes a note. “What did you talk about?”

He remembers the touching, feeling a heavy hand low on his back. It was nice. Adi was about as different from Ava as could be possible, the way back into an activity he’d been avoiding with work and deadlines and arguments with the Department of Defense. 

Did he talk about work while this ingrate was trying to fuck him? He feels like he must’ve. He hopes he didn't talk about Ava.

“This and that. The beach. My _job_.” he shoots a pointed look at Raylan. “There’s a little cloudiness, as you might imagine.”

“Raylan caused a ruckus,” Art continues, and Boyd feels the corner of his mouth twitch up in spite of himself. “And he took you back inside. Do you remember what he said to you, before he took off?” 

He was floating by then, feeling loose and floppy in a way he never, ever was around other people. Half convinced he’d hallucinated Raylan Givens because what in the Sam Hill was he doing here? Adi had pointed off into the distance, some other room… 

“He had to speak to his sister,” Boyd says slowly, fitting the colors back together. “Pretty dark-haired thing, wearing a white waistcoat. Needed to...get to MIA? I think?”

Adi had smiled, said Boyd probably wouldn’t even realize he was gone. He ran a thumb over his ear.

Boyd needed to kill him.

“She was dressed as a waitress,” Art realizes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Damn it.”

“You said get to MIA,” Raylan says. 

Rachel and Art exchanged a glance. “Is that what Kowak told you?” She prodded. “That Anastazja was MIA? Missing in Action?”

“I know what MIA means,” Boyd snaps, thumping his hand against the covered tattoo on his left shoulder without meaning to. Raylan’s eyes flick to it. 

“Maybe he’s helping to disappear her, fake an exit while we’re all waiting for the real one?” Art guesses.

“It’s the airport code,” Raylan said quietly. “Miami International Airport. MIA.” Off the startled look, he jutts his chin down at Boyd. “He said _get_ _to._ Not _go_. This one doesn’t use bad grammar. ‘cept on his tattoos.”

“I didn’t have enough fingers. I went for symmetry over spelling,” Boyd says, somewhat defensively. His words, usually so artful, land awkwardly in the silence. _FUCK YU UP._

Art nods, thoughtful. “We already got eyes on the international terminal, I’ll send over a few more.”

“I’ll go,” Raylan says. 

“Yeah, bet you will,” Rachel mutters under her breath. 

Art smirks, before standing up and holding out his hand. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Crowder. Is there anybody you’d like us to call? We can have someone take you to the hospital.”

Boyd didn’t actually say _hell no,_ but shook his head vehemently enough to get the point across. They say their goodbyes and start moving out, leaving a few uniformed officers standing at the entrances in case Anastazja or Adi came back. Tim is waiting outside, leaning against one of the porch’s support beams. 

“Hey, you okay?”

Raylan strides across the large, circular driveway with easy grace. Boyd can’t quite ignore him moving in the corner of his eye. He doesn’t want to go back to work, with nothing to do and an empty house. He doesn’t want to stay here, have Tim look at him with that pity, that guilt.

A nondescript car just on the right side of shabby beeped across the street as Raylan unlocked it. 

“I’m just fine,” Boyd says. “But I need to go with the Deputy Marshal, answer a few more questions.”

Tim raises his eyebrows. “Really? You were in there a long-ass time.”

“Yeah, I gotta go. I’ll be fine.” He’s already backing down the stairs, needs to get to the car before it peels off. “He’s waiting.”

Tim’s eyes track to Raylan’s car. He laughs. “Oh shit, he’s a cop? Dodged a bullet there, I was one strong drink from throwing myself at him.”

“Ha,” Boyd laughs without showing his teeth.

“Go back to your rocketships,” Raylan says, the moment Boyd slides into the passenger’s seat. 

“I surely will, Raylan. After both these Pollocks are in federal custody.” Raylan half winces, and Boyd vaguely wonders if this is one of those words he’s not supposed to use anymore. He’s a little too preoccupied to care. “This woman must be a terrifying and imposing figure to get y’all so riled up.”

“Anastazja Kowak is not a woman you wanna get tangled up with, Boyd. She’s been trafficking girls out of Eastern Europe for at least two years. ‘fore that, she and Adi were moving drugs, guns, exotic animals. This is the first time she’s touched down on American soil in a decade. _Cause she don’t need to_. The Kowaks got all of Florida and half the Bible Belt locked down.” 

“Well then, we best get a move onto the airport.” Boyd says, pulling the seat belt over his chest. Raylan doesn’t react, squinting through the windshield. “People don’t go up against me and win, Raylan. You know that.” 

Raylan turns the key and ignition flips over. “Gun?” 

Boyd raises an eyebrow. In Harlan, a boy turns ten without being able to shoot, people think he’s simple or queer (and Boyd'll only cop to the latter). Raylan got his first gun at nine. Boyd was seven. Both had their serial numbers scratched off. 

Raylan knows this, of course. It’s strangely refreshing, being looked at by someone who doesn't just see the workaholic with awful tattoos. 

“To my name, yes. On me? No.” Lucky for Adi. 

“Good,” Raylan nods, and the car pulls away from the beach, out onto the highway. “I was gonna confiscate it.”

Ah, he does know him.

* * *

Boyd is quiet on the drive, drumming his fingers gently against the windowpane. No music or talk radio, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

A few miles inland, it’s actually Raylan who breaks the silence. “Where did you serve?”

Boyd touches his shoulder again, confirming the suspicion there’s a _We Will Defend_ tattoo under that shirt. “That obvious?”

“Only way out of Harlan was sports or the military. And you were a mighty skinny kid.” Still is, but it suits him. No longer scrawny, but lean, wiry. Raylan usually doesn’t notice things like that, in men. 

Not that he is. 

“Kuwait.”

“And that got you to _NASA_?” He’s still half sure Boyd’s pulling his leg on that, wants to text Rachel to run a background check when this is all over.

“Figured I’d give the GI Bill a fair shake, check out what all the fuss over higher education was. Couldn’t be worse than juvie or the mines.”

He really was _so_ smart, Raylan remembers. Books stacked up in the back of his truck, arguing about chemical formulas at the mine. Those eyes were bright and alert at five years old, when they ran half-fighting, half-playing at their mamas’ ankles.

Another Harlan boy got out before ceiling caved in, with just as much blood and sweat in the effort. He shouldn’t be surprised it was this one. 

“Who would’ve thought,” he says, lightly. 

“ _I_ did.” Boyd replies, sharp as a knife.

The airport is chaos, a maze of twisting on and off ramps to try to get to Terminal Aeropuerto Internacional. Boyd cranks his seat back and watches the planes lifting into the sky. 

“Did you marry some Texan woman?” He asks. Raylan resists the urge to touch his ring, pulls into the drop-off lane and throws his badge on the dashboard in case someone gives him shit for idling. 

“Nope.” Winona gave him the ring half as a joke, because of his fervent love of Westerns, white-hatted heroes who cleaned up the town. It had become his de facto, after they married. He couldn’t bring himself to take it off, yet. 

“You married, full stop?” An airy, casual tone. Raylan almost believes it.

Raylan turns off the car, and even with the dull roar of shuttles and planes and people, it still feels much quieter in the space between them. 

“Nope,” he says again. “You got yourself a man?”

He’s poking at a bruise, being nasty for no reason. Boyd works his jaw, tries for amused. “If I did, I’d hardly be swanning around at a White Party cocktail hour three hours from my house, now would I?”

They both watch the automatic doors slide open and close for a few seconds.

“Had a woman, for awhile,” Boyd says. 

“Is that right?” Raylan murmurs. Every word out of his mouth is so smooth it can’t all be true. A Harlan knee-jerk to save face.

“Remember Ava Randolph?”

He tears his eyes off the door, startled by the audacity. “You were with _Ava Randolph_?” 

“It’s Ava Crowder, these days.”

Raylan knew that haughty line about not stepping out on a hypothetical boyfriend was a bunch of talk. Then he hates himself for feeling ticked, for letting someone set him off-kilter. Fucking Harlan and all the messed up kids it left in its wake. 

Then he sees Boyd isn’t smiling. Then he remembers his brother, Bowman. 

Well. Screwing his sister-in-law still ain’t something to be high and mighty about. "You two make time before or after she said 'I do'?"

"I believe we concluded the interrogation back at the beach house, Raylan." Boyd is rigid in his seat. This conversation is over. But Raylan figures they’re going to be watching the entrance to International Departures for a while. 

"So you're really a rocket scientist?" A tiny nod on a drawn face. 

Boyd used to read to him, sometimes, after a shift in the mines. They’d be drinking in Audry’s, and he’d be too tired to move, but Boyd couldn’t seem to sit still. “Shut up, this is interesting,” he’d say, and get through a chapter or two without needing anything from Raylan, not even acknowledgement. 

He’d forgotten about that. How nice it was, listening to Boyd talk.

”What’s that like?”

A light came into his eyes. “Imagine the coolest, most awesomest thing a man can do.”

Raylan knew he wasn’t going to guess the right thing. “Which is…?”

“Mars,” Boyd says, grinning. “Mark my words, by 2025 we are going to witness the first manned mission to the Red Planet. I’ve been working on these MPCV – y’all know what those are?”

“No, tell me.”

The long watch seemed to be moving a little faster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is getting longer thanks to the coronavirus locking down society and me getting bored! hooray, pandemic?


	5. Chapter 5

Being able to fall asleep anywhere is a double-edged sword, Boyd has noticed.

It’s a plus when he’s working twenty-hour-days at KSC. He’ll lie down on the carpet under his desk and just shut off for fifteen minutes, long enough to get the juices flowing again. Then he’ll bounce right back up. It disturbs the interns greatly.

It’s a minus when he really, _really_ needs to stay awake. Raylan’s cramped passenger seat, surrounded by the din of an international airport, shuttle bus exhaust fumes blowing in his face – this should not lend itself to napping. And yet…

“I saw that,” Raylan says, when Boyd pinches his own thigh for the second time. The sun’s long gone now, and there’s still no sign of Anastazja or Adi. Raylan stretches out his own legs as far as he can. “I'm calling it. You need some rest.”

“I’m right as rain, Raylan.” 

“That wasn’t a question.” The clock in the car reads 12:13 AM. “Ain’t nobody coming through here tonight. Anastazja probably realized Adi ran his mouth to you. One person knows, and then there’s twenty pairs of eyes on her.”

Boyd rubs his burning eyes with his fists, like he’s a little kid. “So what’s Plan B? Lock down the highways again? It surely would annoy my friend Timothy, if you want a mark in the Pro column.”

Raylan is already on the phone with his boss, talking about a reserve team, uniform officers driving perimeters around MIA for the next four hours. “They ain’t gonna get anybody, Art,” he says. Boyd hears a snatch on the other side of the line that sounds like, _just in case_. 

“I’m not leaving Miami until we get these unsavory people,” Boyd says, the second he hangs up. God, how his priorities had changed in the last day.

‘I know.”

“My department’s entire budget is being reviewed by congress, I can stay in this car for the next _twenty years_ without missing anything.” Boyd stops talking long enough to register Raylan’s words. Oh. Well, good. 

He doesn’t remember the name of the hotel Tim and his friend’s booked by the beach. It had been too early to check-in when they got to Miami, and all their bags were still in his car. He pulled his phone out to text him, and found it dead. All that obsessive emailing. Shit. 

“Raylan,” he says slowly, grinding his back teeth. “Could you point me towards the closest motel?”

The flashing lights of the relief team come up in the rearview mirror, and Raylan waves to them, pulling the car back out into the maze of exits. “There’s about ten in spitting distance. They’re all full though. White Party.”

“Goddamn White Party.” 

Maybe he’ll just sleep in Raylan’s car. Worst came to worst, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d wandered the street all night. He could stand to get a few more drinks (sealed up tight upon reception, this time), get into a fight with a stranger. 

“Not a huge fan of that manic look in your eye, Boyd.” Raylan says. Boyd starts. They’re clear of the airport, driving closer to the coast than he realized. “I have a couch. But I’m only extending the offer if I’m sure you’re not going to come at me with a kitchen knife.”

Boyd admonishes himself to _pull it together, Crowder_. He hates this day full of zoning out, of letting other people move him around like a ragdoll. He holds up two fingers, the _F-U_ ones. “Scout’s honor.”

Raylan’s condo is farther outside the city than he was expecting, past the neon-lit clubs and the tourist traps, the crowds of people in white mesh clothes and waving glow sticks. Boyd rolls the window down, letting the cool night air flow through the car. The sky is getting darker, constellations clearer. The sight of Miami’s light pollution stripping away calms something in the pit of his stomach. 

“I need something else in exchange for opening my doors to you,” Raylan says. 

“I have been relieved of my belongings, Raylan. And I didn’t think U.S. Marshal’s were allowed to partake in marijuana,” Boyd said, a little smile. He doesn’t have confident enough footing to make the last part of the _cash, grass, or ass_ joke. 

Raylan turns off the wheezy air conditioning in the car, puts his own window down. “You gotta tell me what happened with Ava.” Boyd’s jaw locks up. “Second I said her name...I ain’t seen you look that stricken in all my life. Not even in the mines.”

“I wasn’t scared of the mines.” He wasn’t, probably the reason he lasted longer there. He just hated them. Found the work tedious, the air unbreathable. But something in his gut told him he wasn’t destined to die down there, he knew it like he knew his own name. Ava always poked his ribs and asked if he’d taken an extra drama pill when he started out on that.

Right. Ava.

“You’re stalling,” Raylan says. 

Boyd leans his elbow on the edge of the window, tilts so he can look up at the sky, Orion and the Dippers and Subaru. He needs something soothing to hang onto if he’s going to tell this story.

“She married my brother straight after high school, ‘bout a year after you left Harlan. I’d always lusted after her, ever since we were little. Thought she was the most beautiful thing in the entire county.”

“You were not alone in that opinion,” Raylan says. He sounds like he’s smiling, but Boyd needs to keep looking at the stars. 

“And I loved Bowman, you know that, but the sole reason Ava married him is because she was eighteen and he talked a big game about being drafted by the NFL, getting them out. That obviously didn’t come to pass, but by then I was in Kuwait and then school and then down here. I left them behind. He’d call once a year, usually to bitch about Daddy or the business. Couldn’t remember the last time Ava was on the line.” He flexed his fingers. “Took me fifteen years to realize it’s because he wasn’t letting her use the phone.

"She was sitting on the steps outside my apartment when I came back from work one day, going on three years ago now. Arm in a sling, half her face bruised up.” He swallowed thickly. “She said she’d run out in the middle of the night, came to Orlando because it was the farthest place from Harlan where she knew someone and…Bowman would never believe anyone’d go to me for help.”

Raylan nodded, eyes on the road. “But you did help her.”

“I don’t hit women, Raylan.” He gave Ava his room, slept on the couch when he got home from KSC in the wee hours of the morning. When he woke, she made him coffee. It had been nice, having someone else in the house when he got home from work, eating late dinners at his kitchen table. One night, after six months and a little too much whiskey, Ava put on an old Johnny Cash CD and they danced around the living room together, his hands on her hips. That night, she let him back into his own bed, kissed him like it was giving her air.

Boyd hadn’t realized he was lonely, until Ava showed up.

“She got a job at a salon in the city. We were very happy, almost two years,” Boyd scrunches up his face like his nose was itching. “When I’d get to fretting about the MPCVs, she’d kiss me and say, ‘baby, I’ll love you even if the damn thing falls out of the sky.’” He lets himself luxuriate in this memory for a second. In his memory, Ava will love him forever. 

If the places were reversed, he’d be prodding Raylan to get on with it, make some crack about delayed martial bliss. But Raylan is quiet as always, and he’s grateful. He rubs his face.

“Ah, Bowman finally tracked her down, broke into our place with a shotgun, mad as a dog. She got the gun away, got his shoulder, but he put her down with his fists.” His little brother was twice the size of Boyd, and dwarfed Ava even more. “I lost my composure, I must admit.”

They turned into Raylan’s driveway, but his hand twitched over the gear shift, not parking. “You gonna admit to something I need my cuffs for?”

“He’s alive,” Boyd said bitterly. “Not for lack of trying on my part. Beat the hell out of him, used the tail end of the shotgun to get his face good. Ava came to just as I separated his left eye from his skull.” 

“Jesus.” Raylan did park the car now, turned to look at him. 

“We ran him off, but she said,” he swallowed again, but this time it did nothing to steady his voice. “Said she wasn’t trading in one violent man for another. She had to run again, ‘fore we both got busted for assault or Bowman found his nerve to come back. And she left.”

It’s his first time telling the tale, all at once like that. Even Tim only wheedled it out in pieces, over months of drinking together. Now he’s raw and exhausted in front of Raylan Givens, of all people.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Raylan says, and while there's not a tremendous amount of feeling in his voice, he seems genuine. Boyd squirms at the idea of his pity. He clears his throat loudly. 

"You know, I got the right to run until I hit the Atlantic Ocean or Iraq or Mars, but I'm always gonna be a Crowder. Ava was just the first person to point that out."

"Boyd–"

“Come on, you got a mighty fine set-up here. Can actually see the stars!” Hopping out of the car, he leaves his door open and sits on the hood, boots knocking against the bumper. "Look at that little bright dot. That's Venus, beacon in the dark."

He patted the spot next to him, which creaked as Raylan joined them, moving slowly like his legs were tender. 

“We got special regulations on Merritt Island, keeps the airspace clear and everything, but nothing beats those Harlan stars,” Boyd says. “Don’t miss much about that place, but I do miss that sky.” 

“You feel guilty you left?” Raylan asks. _Left Ava?_

“Do you?” Boyd snaps. _Left your family? Left me?_

Raylan raises his hands in surrender for a moment, before lowering them to rest on the car on either side of his legs. His right pinky brushes up against Boyd’s thigh. Boyd’s afraid to breathe for a second, wonders if this is a mistake, if it’s something more. 

"You are _nothing_ like the man I thought you'd've grown up to be, Boyd Crowder," Raylan moves his finger, up and down his leg. Boyd actually laughs, from frayed nerves more than anything else.

“What do you think you’re doing, Raylan Givens?” 

He doesn’t remove his hand, just shrugs. “That was a good kiss, earlier, that’s all.” 

“Oh, was it?”

Raylan tilts his head and smiles, and Boyd’s always thought he had a smile like the sunshine, _his_ teeth are fake but Raylan somehow survived the sugar rot and lack of any dentist in a fifty miles radius of Harlan and came out beaming. “You know something else I don’t miss about Harlan?” His hand fully grips Boyd’s thigh now. “Could never get away with doing this.”

He kisses Boyd, not on reflex, not out of surprise, and it’s anything but gentle.


	6. Chapter 6

Raylan collected his share of secrets over the course of his life in Harlan. 

The whuppings he endured at his daddy’s hands, hidden from his school or anyone in town who’d give a damn. Money he was socking away under his floorboards, so no one could drink it away before he could escape. Little things too, like how he pissed the bed three or four times in the month after Frances died, even though he’d just turned nineteen, from the stress of it all.

Helen knew about most of these, granted, stripped the sheets before Arlo could catch on and said nothing while Raylan burned crimson. She gave him her own savings just a few weeks later, after the mine collapse, told him to run.

But even she didn’t know about the boys. How Raylan wanted them the same way he did girls.

His heart beat too fast in the locker room after baseball practice, or when some other white trash boy with a six-pack in his truck grinned at him. He had sex with Katy McClaren at a drive-in and thought, as much as he loved the feeling of her warm, curvy hips underneath him, he wouldn’t mind kissing Indiana Jones, who was currently running across the screen, either.

Thinking that way got you killed in Harlan. So he didn’t let himself. Thirty-six years old, seventeen years gone from the holler, and it was still a hard habit to break. 

But now Boyd Crowder was sitting on the hood of his car, who knew those risks, had faced them himself, and still wasn’t afraid. Who had kissed him, smiling, just that afternoon.

So Raylan let himself think about it. And then he let himself act on it.

It wasn’t that different from kissing a woman. Boyd’s skin was a little rougher, even though he was clean shaven, but his lips were soft, pillowy. He reaches up and grabs a handful of Raylan’s hair. A tug, not hard enough to really hurt, but to elicit a mewling voice from the back of Raylan’s throat. He slides his hands up Boyd’s back, pushing against him, until they almost fall horizontal across the hood. 

“Whoa there, cowboy,” Boyd breaks the kiss, presses his palms against Raylan’s chest. “Much as I enjoy this development, I’m confident enough in my strengths and weaknesses to know I am not versatile nor young enough to copulate on the hood of your shitty car.”

Raylan breathes shallowly, still trying to adjust to his own daring. It takes him a second to translate. “Jesus, Boyd, you know you can just say ‘let’s go inside’."

“Where’s the fun in that?”

* * *

Raylan’s condo is a tragic bachelor cliche. Sparse, plain furniture, nothing on the kitchen table but a bottle of whiskey and leftovers wrapped in tin foil. If there had ever been a woman in here – the one who gave him that awful ring, maybe – all traces of her were long gone. Boyd noted a framed photo of Raylan and his mama in the living room, the only personal touch. 

No matter. Long as he had a bed, Boyd could criticize his decorating taste later. 

He’s kicked off his boots and jeans before it even occurs to him Raylan might want to do the honors. The thought makes his mouth go a little dry. Boyd leans back on Raylan’s mattress, balancing on his elbows. Raylan walks right up to him, stands between his spread legs, and presses a kiss to Boyd’s chin as he starts unbuttoning his shirt. 

“You went a little crazy with the stick-and-pokes, didn’t you?” Raylan murmurs. He runs a hand over the JC tattoo above Boyd’s heart, the crooked lines of Maugham and Asimov quotes stretching across his lower belly. 

Boyd inhales Raylan’s smell, musk of the day’s exertion, faded deodorant and cheap cologne. He closes his hand around his shining belt buckle. “You ever _been_ to juvie, Raylan? It’s goddamn boring.”

They make quick work of the rest of their clothes, Raylan’s stubble scraping against his cheek, kissing him even as he works off their socks, pulls lube out of his bedside table and throws it on the comforter. Boyd scoots up towards the headboard, but Raylan stops him in the center of the mattress. For the first time, something falters behind his eyes. 

“Gonna need you to take the lead on this,” he says, and he’s always quiet, but this comes out as a whisper. 

“C’mere, boy,” Boyd says, and guides Raylan into his lap, ankles crossing behind Boyd's back. He’s heavy, but not enough to make Boyd's legs feel crushed or numb. Good. He wants to make this good for Raylan. “Hand me the bottle.”

He slicks up his fingers – _U, U, P –_ takes Raylan’s hips and tilts him backs just a little. “Deep breath, now,” he says.

“Fuck you,” Raylan says, leaning in, knocking their foreheads together.

Boyd works his middle finger into Raylan entrance, then his index. “Other way around, darling.”

Raylan inhales sharply through his teeth, presses his face into Boyd’s neck. He pushes in another finger – he’s so _tight,_ Boyd wonders if he’s ever had anything up here before, even his own fingers – and Raylan bites down on the slope of his shoulder. 

It stings. Boyd shoves his third finger in a lot less gently. Raylan tightens around him, nips him with his teeth again. 

“How’s that feel?” Boyd asks, lips right up against his ear. It’s rhetorical, he can see Raylan getting hard between them, cock straining up against his stomach. He wants to hear him say it.

“Mmmhmm,” Raylan hums, and he looks up, reproachfully. That’s all he’s gonna get.

Boyd twists his fingers, and he can feel the muscles clenching, then relaxing, getting used to the fullness. He does it again. 

“The best part ain’t even here yet,” he says, and for all his bravado, his own breath is getting heavier, his own cock filling out. He strokes himself once, twice, then pulls back. Not yet. 

Raylan lifts his head to look him square in the eye, then lunges forward and kisses Boyd hard, pulling on his bottom lip with his teeth. “Get on with it, then.”

Boyd pulls out his fingers, props his back up against the headboard and pulls Raylan with him. 

“Now, let’s not get mouthy,” he says, slaps Raylan’s ass as the man kneels over him, bracing his hand against the bedroom wall above Boyd’s head. “I’m gonna make you see stars, Raylan Givens.”

He lines Raylan up so the head of Boyd’s dick rubs against the cleft of his ass. Raylan’s hand slips on the wall as he lowers himself down onto his cock, inch by inch. It’s so hot Boyd almost loses it right then. Raylan’s hands settle in his hair as he bottoms out, his eyes flutter closed.

“Fuck,” he hisses, flush spreading on his chest, up his neck. 

And Boyd forgets every word in his impressive vocabulary. “Yeah,” he manages, half laughing, and starts to thrust up.

As they rock together, Raylan sinks down even farther, hands on Boyd’s ears, his neck. Boyd’s cock brushes up against _that spot_ inside of him, and his mouth actually falls open, even as he tries to rein his expression back in. He reaches down and starts to jerk himself off, uneven and desperate in a way Boyd’s never seen that body move. He pulls Raylan closer, hands on the small of his back, and kisses him while he comes inside of him. 

Raylan is a _spectacular_ kisser. There’s that gentle touch, sweetness in his lips he’d never expect. 

He leans against Boyd's shoulder again, hand moving faster. He’s coming less than a minute later, messy spurts that stripe Boyd’s stomach and thighs, but he can’t bring himself to care. He pulls out as delicately as he can, remembering how things lean towards tender, after the first time. Raylan doesn’t seem to notice, though, and rolls off of him with ease. He lays down with his head on Boyd’s sticky lap.

Boyd runs his hand through that hair again. Just because he can.

A deep breath from Raylan, then another one, leveling out. “I didn’t think it’d be like that.”

“What? Screwing a man?” He ran his hand lightly down Raylan’s chest. “Or screwing me?”

He smirks, looking up at the ceiling. “Both, I guess.”

“You think a lot about making time with me, back in the holler?” Boyd asks, teasing. “Wanted to bend me over in the mines?” 

Raylan just smiles, sleepy and content. There’s a warm feeling ballooning in Boyd’s chest, one that’s been absent for far too long. It makes him nervous, the urge to hang onto someone so strong it almost seems violent. He wants to tell Raylan every thought in his head, force him to become confidante to every dirty secret. The things he’s done. The things he wants to do, and the things he never will.

 _Boyd, you’re the most obsessive person I’ve ever met._ Tim told him that once, when he was sitting in his office with a bottle of whiskey, the night after Ava left. _Like, I think you have something. Like a psychiatrist could probably run some tests on you–_

He’d cut him off then. _Thank you for your input, Timothy._

* * *

Boyd looks like he’s thinking too hard. Raylan still feels like he’s made of jelly – goddamn, why’d he hold off so long on fucking men? – but he manages to reach up and put his hand on top of Boyd’s. 

“Your face is gonna stick like that.” 

Boyd shakes his thoughts away, picks up Raylan’s hand and kisses the back of his palm. “Just pondering the past. You know, I had a truly gargantuan crush on you in high school.”

“Did you now?”

Boyd nods. Smiling, but his eyes look far away. “Surely did. Those form-fitting baseball uniforms? Lord have mercy.” 

Raylan gathers enough strength to put his hands around the back of Boyd’s neck, pull his head down to kiss him again. “You’re right, we could’ve had a lot of fun.”

Boyd slides down, throwing a leg over Raylan to straddle him. He still seems somewhere a little farther off – Raylan wonders if this is his first time back in the saddle since Ava – but he kisses hard, like they’re teenagers desperate for every second they can stay connected, and so Raylan acquiesces, picking a more lazy speed, because they’ve got at least until sunrise, and he wants a round two.

They both hear the gun cock at the same time.


	7. Chapter 7

“ _You_ are more handsome,” Anastazja muses, jerking her gun towards Raylan. “But I think you are the one my brother had eye on, yes?” A movement towards Boyd. “He is always…” she clicks her tongue, trying to find the phrase in English. “He likes the ones who have sadness.”

The last time Boyd had a gun on him in bed, he’d at least been afforded the dignity of wearing sweatpants. He rolls off Raylan, tangling them both in the sheets in a way that somehow makes him feel more and less exposed at once.

Anastazja is dressed for stealth and sensibility, head-to-toe black clothing and flat, hard-soled sneakers. She’s older than Adi, or at least more obviously arranges the gray in her hair into thick streaks. 

Her gun has a silencer on it.

“Now, let’s not be uncivil,” Boyd manages, and his voice is a little hoarse, but he’s pleased with how calm his tone comes out. Raylan cuts him off before he has to think of a witty rejoinder, though, a hand braced on his thigh. His skin is still hot.

“He’s a civilian, got nothing to do with this,” Raylan says. His face is stony, voice dead serious. If it wasn’t for his exceedingly messy hair, no one would guess he’d just been fucked. “Why don’t you and I talk outside?”

Boyd raises an eyebrow, finding room in his brain’s Survival Mode to be offended. “I’m fine, Raylan.”

“We go outside, the sad one runs to police, ‘ _Anastazja is in condo, I will bring you right there’_.” She affects a higher, mocking voice Boyd thinks is supposed to be him. 

“Where I come from, we don’t involve law enforcement in our affairs if we can help it,” Boyd says. He’s trying to remember where Raylan’s gun is, probably on the bedroom floor under his crumpled jeans, still hanging in its holster. 

He doesn’t like the odds of being able to reach it before Anastazja pulls the trigger. 

* * *

Raylan doesn’t like the odds of being able to reach his gun before Anastazja pulls the trigger. 

Boyd’s closer, for one, and if he jumped over him, he could trip and smash his head on the floor before the shot even came. 

He always locks his front door. _Always._ Even if he’s drunk, or coming off 36 hours straight on a bail jumper’s tail, or when he’s falling through the threshold with another man’s hands on his hips for the first time. He is the son of Frances and Arlo Givens, he doesn’t let his guard down _ever_.

He did, however, neglect to lock the second floor window behind Anastazja, the screen ripped from the edge and pushed in where it looked like someone punched through it and lifted the glass.

_Stupid, stupid, Raylan._

Anastazja laughs at Boyd’s genuinely offended statement that he’s not a rat. “You are very involved with this one, though, no? That was your mistake. The men my brother takes to bed, at least they don’t die naked.” 

She takes a shot. Four years of military training and thirty-six years of being Boyd Crowder makes him tuck and roll without a second's thought. Off the mattress and under Raylan’s bed, dust bunnies sticking to his legs. Anastazja sighs, leans forward to shoot under the frame. Boyd kicks one of the long, low plastic bins Raylan uses to store the odd winter jacket in front of him. It’s a truly strange sound, the bullet slicing through plastic. 

“Boyd? How we doing down there?” Raylan asks, not taking his eyes off Anastazja. 

“Terrific,” Boyd says, but he sounds strained, teeth gritted. He sounds hurt. 

Fuck. 

Fuck _it._

Raylan lunges to the foot of his mattress, knocking into Anastazja with such force they both tumble to the window, her ass banging against the sill. She pulls the trigger at Raylan’s gut, but he twists just in time. It skims the skin on his hip and goes into his headboard.

“That wasn’t nice,” he manages, even as the stinging starts. “Spent over $30 on this bedframe,”

“As uninspired as Raylan’s furniture is, and you and I are of one mind on that Ms. Kowak, there are other ways to express displeasure.” Boyd’s trying for calm, cool, even though he looks the craziest Raylan’s ever seen him. He’s bleeding in his leg where the bullet hit him, dust in his wild hair, and still naked, is pointing Raylan’s Glock an inch from Anastazja’s head. “Drop it.”

Anastazja does, and her gun clatters to the ground. Raylan catches it under his foot and slides it away. 

“Now, if y’all give me a moment to compose myself.” Raylan throws on his boxers and jeans, reaches into the top drawer of his nightstand to get his handcuffs. “Coming at you.” He tosses Boyd’s boxers over his shoulder, thinking he’ll catch them.

When he turns around, though, Boyd still has the gun trained on Anastazja, pressing it hard into her temple now. 

“Boyd?” Raylan shakes the handcuffs, but he doesn’t move. 

“Where’s your brother?” He hisses. Anastazja rolls her eyes. She tries to cross her arms, but the movement just makes Boyd push the gun harder. She swears in Polish. “Man like that, makes us _all_ look bad. Tell me where to find that abhorrent, detestable rapist and I will consider not putting a bullet in your head.” 

“Jesus, Boyd,” Raylan clicks the handcuffs over Anastazja’s wrists and pushes on her shoulder so she sinks to sit on the edge of his mattress. Boyd continues to keep the Glock trained on her until Raylan rips it out of his hand. 

Boyd blinks, like he’s coming out of a trance. 

“Your leg in fighting shape?” Raylan asks slowly, clicking the safety on and putting it back into his holster. Boyd reaches down and touches the blood, looking at his fingers as they lift away.

“For the time being,” he says quietly. 

“Put your clothes on,” Raylan says. “I’m gonna make some calls.” Boyd doesn’t respond, and Raylan leans in to kiss him, stroke the back of his neck with his fingers. Raylan keeps his eyes open, still amazed, in spite of it all, that the sky hasn’t come crashing down because he kissed a boy. Boyd’s muscles don’t relax under his touch, though, and he pulls back. “Hey. Look at me.”

Boyd does, reluctantly. He’s got those irises that change color depending on the light around him. They’re green now, and angry like rushing water. 

“We’re gonna get him. You have my word.”

Anastazja spits on the floor, murmurs something else in Polish. Boyd’s head snaps like a stick breaking. 

“I ain’t crazy.”

Raylan raises an eyebrow, rubs a little circle on the top of Boyd’s spine with his thumb. “You speak Polish?”

Boyd doesn't smile. “I got a whole life you know nothing about.”

* * *

Boyd doesn’t actually speak Polish, just knows a handful of curse words from Sasha, an engineer at JPL who used to get very frustrated with Boyd’s perfectionist tendencies and frequently forgot to mute their video chats to complain about him. 

He got _crazy_ a lot. 

He gets his clothes on, shirt buttoned up to the neck. He gets his GSW cleaned and wrapped – mostly superficial, they got it done in the ambulance and handed him a bottle of painkillers – and limps to lean against the side of Raylan’s car while the Marshals take Anastazja away. 

Silence fills his mind. He's too focused for any plan to come out as mere words. _This is what it's like to be an animal._

“Why was Mr. Crowder in your condo at this late hour?” Art asks. They’re huddled a few feet away. Raylan shrugs, looks to the side with his tongue in his cheek. Art groans, letting his head tip back against his spine. “No. _No._ Since when? Now I gotta warn you about sleeping with _every_ witness? You know how many more men are involved in fugitive searches than women?”

“What’s going on?” Rachel asked, jogging down the front steps. 

“Raylan’s trying to kill me, is all.”

“Oh, good,” she says breezily. Raylan catches her arm, whispers something in her ear. She glances over at Boyd, just fast enough to miss, and nods. 

Raylan bids them good night, walks over to Boyd. He puts his hand on the roof of the car and leans in. For a second Boyd thinks he’s getting another kiss – he doesn't really want one, he’s somehow buzzing and completely fried at the same time – but Raylan just nuzzles against his cheek, whispers in his ear.

“Alright. Let’s find that son of a bitch."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there IS more sex coming I promise


	8. Chapter 8

Daybreak is teasing on the horizon, the first shades of a lighter blue at the corner of the skies. It’s stuffy in the car, but Raylan keeps the windows cranked up and locked. Lessons learned. His hip aches from the scrape the gunshot left. 

Boyd’s all twisted up next to him, face stormy. He pulls an expression that makes him look so much like his daddy Raylan actually feels like he’s back in Harlan for a second, watching their parents fight at the bar. 

He reaches over the console and rubs Boyd’s thigh through his jeans. He feels a little like he did right after he lost his virginity. Now that he’s had a taste, actually did the thing he spent so much time wondering about, his body just wants more, more, _more_. 

Boyd rolls his eyes, squirms away. “Please don’t give me your morning after routine,” he says. 

“You think my morning after routine is driving the woman I had sex with to arrest somebody?” There’s no response. Raylan wonders if he heard Art going on about all the witnesses he’d slept with. Boyd doesn’t seem like the type liable to get pissed about something like that. 

He doesn’t really know him, though. Not anymore.

“I was gonna make you breakfast.” Boyd actually snorts at this. “Well, I’d _buy_ it. There’s a grocery store a few blocks away that doesn’t freezer burn the hell out of it’s ice cream.”

“Oh, now I get downgraded from bacon and eggs to _ice cream_?” Boyd asks, but he uncrosses his arms. “No wonder you ain’t married, Raylan.” 

* * *

Boyd can’t seem to simmer down. This is what Ava was scared of, what he was scared of. He was going to kill that woman, splatter her all over Raylan’s bedroom, and he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. 

_Crowders are violent pieces of shit._

Raylan keeps looking at him, though, and eventually he’s gonna start asking questions, putting things together if Boyd doesn't snap out of this attitude.

He’s joking about ice cream. He’s so handsome. Something so beautiful shouldn’t have been able to come out of Harlan.

A part of Boyd’s heart he thought was charred beyond repair starts to pulse faintly, looking at him.

He shakes it off. He’s on a mission of revenge. He’s a one man army that shouldn’t be fucked with. He doesn’t want a _boyfriend._

Raylan makes them stop back at Adi’s house, now deserted, yellow tape encircling the building. He wants his hat, which is, incredibly, still there. The brim is caught in between slats on the deck. While he does a sweep of the house on the slim chance someone is still inside, Boyd digs through Adi’s study and finds a place to charge his phone. 

He also steals a gold-plated letter opener. It’s a _really_ nice letter-opener.

“You know you can use those things to unlock doors?” Raylan appears in the doorway, looking like a goddamn cowboy again. Boyd smiles, holds it out to Raylan. 

“You aiming to open us up some secret passageway? Some of these old houses have them, used to hide runaway slaves.”

Raylan takes it, turns it over in his hand. “Not in Florida, they didn’t.” He steps into the room, backs Boyd against the edge of Adi’s glossy, mahogany desk, sets the letter opener on the surface. 

He knocks Boyd’s legs apart with his knee.

* * *

Raylan doesn’t like being made to look foolish. He doesn’t like acknowledgment or insinuation that he doesn’t hold all the cards. He’s never sucked cock before in his life. He’s sure any effort to rectify this fact would be sloppy, inexperienced, embarrassing. 

He drops to his knees in front of Boyd anyway. 

“Raylan…” Boyd pauses between the syllables, his breathing getting choppy. He says his name, the one Raylan always hated for being made-up and white trash, like a prayer. Raylan slides his hand up between Boyd’s thighs, cupping him through his jeans. There’s a twitch of interest. He rubs his thumb back and forth.

Winona told him once that he was a slut. She’d been half-joking, out of breath when he crawled down the mattress to eat her out for the third time in the hour, on their honeymoon. He’d just kissed her hip – “don’t hear you complaining, darling” – and gotten back to his plans to make her come, even though something in the back of his mind was irked.

Now, rubbing another man’s dick at a crime scene, still mid-manhunt, he thinks she was probably right. 

Raylan unbuttons Boyd’s jeans, pushes them down in a bunch with his boxers. He tries to remember what women did, all his girlfriends and flings and one night stands, what he liked. He pulls Boyd's cock out with a faux-ease.

The fumbling becomes obvious almost immediately. His jaw strains with the weight of it in his mouth, and Boyd’s first involuntary thrust makes him gag.

“As flattered as I am by this attempt, you don’t have to make it. I’m fine,” Boyd says, even as he gets harder. He knocks Raylan's hat back, almost off his head, and touches his fingers to his hairline.

Raylan takes a breath through his nose, hollows his cheeks, and starts to use his tongue. The second little push against the back of his throat doesn’t throw him so off-kilter, and by the third, he thinks he’s found a rhythm. 

Always was a fast learner, with the physical stuff.

He reaches up to lay his palms flat against Boyd’s stomach, slides his sweaty palms up his chest under that white shirt, not so crisp anymore. Boyd catches his wrists, holds on to him tight. His eyes are closed.

When he comes in a rush, bitter and salty, Raylan is too surprised to do anything but swallow it, graceless and choking. He feels his eyes getting big, the way they always do in the split second he throws the punch, fires the gun. 

Crosses the line. 

“Goddamn, you are beautiful, Raylan Givens.”

It’s almost a panic reflex, except that feeling never comes. 

* * *

Boyd goes boneless, all the tension drained out of him like someone pulled the plug. Still an animal. His leg is killing him, and all he wants to do is lie down, but he can see Raylan is painfully hard in his own pants. He tugs him into standing by his wrists.

“Come on, c’mere, baby.” It slips out. He doesn’t...he didn’t use that particular nomenclature for anyone but Ava. 

He keeps breathing anyway.

Just pulls Raylan flush against him with one hand on the small of his back, the other working its way under the waistband of his underwear. Raylan moans, presses his face into Boyd’s neck as he starts stroking him off.

“Acting like a teenager,” Boyd murmurs, not sure which one of them he’s talking about. If he’d known at sixteen that he’d have his hand down Raylan Givens's pants, just moments after the man in question felt him up and swallowed his cock, he might have passed out where he stood. Raylan hangs onto him tighter at the remark, so he doubles down. "One taste of cock and you're begging for it at every stop."

Raylan glares out the side of his eye, a silent _shut up, Boyd_. Boyd isn't deterred. That intense draw is emerging again, the kind that makes him want to pull Raylan in so close to his soul that they become one entity, nothing hidden, nothing withheld. "We're gonna have to get you a vibrator to keep your glove console. Need something to keep you together long enough to read folks their rights." 

The thought makes his hand stutter a little, and it must get Raylan going too, because a moment later his fingers are warm, sticky. Raylan's coming in his own pants.

He grabs a fistful of Boyd’s shirt, riding it out. Boyd’s always loved the way the body smells in the summer air, loves the way it smells after sex too. Raylan's got both in the light sheen of sweat on his skin.

Raylan mumbles something he can’t quite make out – there’s blood rushing in his own ears – but a faint fragment of _glad_ and _you_ reaches his ear. He sighs, rubs the dip in Raylan’s back just above his ass. Tries to force the ocean of feelings coursing just under the surface back into their designated box in his mind. 

“You ain’t gotta coddle me, you know.” He doesn’t know what’s worse, pity for nearly getting raped or pity for being a Crowder, an angry asshole. “Not that I didn’t enjoy the fellatio, but I'm not a bomb that needs to be defused by oral means.”

Raylan lifts his head. “You hear that?”

Boyd thinks this is a clever spin on an attempt to make him stop talking. He swats Raylan. “Oh, go wash your jizz off your legs.” 

Raylan doesn’t smirk, though. He pulls himself upright, straightens his hat. “Something’s buzzing.”

“My cellular device, just plugged it back in.” Boyd rubbed his face, using the last of his leg strength to hop onto the desk, sit awhile. “Probably just Timothy, confirming you have not thrown me in beach prison.”

“The hell is beach prison?” Raylan calls, slipping into the bathroom in the hallway to clean himself up.

Boyd stretches across the surface of the desk to grab his phone, his palm feeling sticky. He should probably wash up a little too. “I don’t know where you keep the heathens in this modern day Sodom and Gamorrah.”

Sure enough, a voicemail from Tim. Boyd absently sticks the letter opener down the ankle of his boot, outside the sock. He does it with pencils and protractors at work all the time, tells people it’s an unconscious army thing. It’s actually from juvie. 

_Hey, Boyd, call me as soon as you get this. We’re at an after-party on South Beach, near 4th and Ocean Drive, and I think I have eyes on your guy. Safety in numbers, and all, right? I’ll keep a look, but get your ass here before he wanders off._

Boyd checks the timestamp on the message. Only four minutes old.

* * *

Raylan's wiping himself down with one of Adi's hand towels – sincerely hoping he doesn't have to explain what ends up there to a CSI team – when his own phone lights up. Rachel.

"What you got for me?"

" _Nothing much_ ," she says. " _Bowman Crowder's in the system, but just barely. A DUI about ten years back, and twice the cops came to break up a domestic between him and his wife, but no charges were ever brought. Called down to local PD, they said no one's seen him in almost a year."_

Raylan tucks the phone between his ear and shoulder as he hikes his pants back up. "Anyone declare him missing?"

" _No, they weren't too surprised. Apparently he'd been working for his daddy on a minor drug operation, more of a hindrance than a help. Ran up a lot of debts. Say it's not unlikely he skipped town."_ Rachel pauses on the other end of the line, and the silence seems to buzz. _"There a reason you got me looking up our witness's brother?"_

Raylan swallows, looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and smooths down his shirt. "Emergency contact shit. He's wanting to update it anyway."

 _"Yeah, I bet,"_ Rachel says, like she knows he's full of shit.

He ignores this. "Thank you. Talk later."

His finger is on the red END CALL button when he hears his name again.

“Raylan!” Boyd calls, clomping down the hall despite what must be considerable pain in his leg. "We have to go, right now.”


	9. Chapter 9

Boyd wishes he had a gun.

He often feels like that, never can quite settle, even when he’s just in his office and nobody’s aiming anything harsher than a laser pointer at him. Veteran shit. Harlan shit. 

Raylan walking by his side, resting a palm on his holster with an almost bored ease, makes him feel better. But only just a little. The next time Tim even tries to drag him to the diner down the block from KSC, he’s making sure he’s armed. 

Where the hell _is_ Gutterson?

The beach is still packed, even in the weak light of daybreak. It’s almost a slow motion bacchanal, crowds of men in white mesh, dancing, drinking, swaying through the gradual crash of their latest high. Boyd can sense plenty of eyes dragging over Raylan’s body, hungry. 

He fights down the urge to touch him as his own, a possessive hand wrapped around the back of his neck. Reign in the passion, Crowder. Reign in the crazy. 

_“Can we reign in the crazy, Boyd?” Ava is standing over Bowman twitching on the floor of their bedroom. The spray of blood on her clavicle and chin must be reflected on his own. “We gotta move him now, ‘fore the sun comes up.”_

_He presses his lips together, tasting iron. “I know, baby.”_

* * *

When he was younger, Raylan would’ve had himself a real good time at a party like this. 

The muggy heat reminds him of being a teenager, the Kentucky summer nights that turned into dim mornings where the humidity never broke. Keggers on someone’s back forty, everyone loopy and hot-skinned. Some of the best sex of his life was with girlfriends in the sticky woods, the air hazy around them.

Boyd doesn’t look nostalgic, though, even though Raylan knows they were at the same parties, hands up skirts and backs against the same rough trees. 

_I had a truly gargantuan crush on you in high school._

It’s hard for him to square that idea with the hard look in the man’s eye now, scanning the dying embers of a rave with eyes like a jungle cat. Boyd doesn’t search, he hunts. He doesn’t rough up, he destroys. 

And whether he’s seventeen or thirty-six, he doesn’t just _like_ someone, he loves them until it's squeezed all the air out of the room.

Raylan knows the best way to pin down a flashy fugitive is to look for tight clumps of people. They always needed an audience. He weaves through the gyrating crowds, the club music playing so loudly he feels the bones in his ears trembling. He closes his hand around Boyd’s wrist, pulling him along two paces before he even realizes he’s doing it. 

Boyd doesn’t look mad. He just keeps swiveling his head around, trying to find the center of the throng, just like him.

“Now shooting into the air would certainly clear the place,” he muses. “But it’ll also probably cause a bit of panic." 

Raylan blinks, glad he’s holding onto the part of Boyd that could most easily get to his holster. “ _Yeah_.”

“Okay, well. There's always a Plan B."

Boyd drags them to the top of the sand dunes, where a DJ and his ear-splitting speakers are set up. It’s a pretty good vantage point, Raylan notes, can see almost everybody from above their heads. He doesn’t get a chance to do a real survey of the place, though, before Boyd yanks the microphone from the DJ’s table and kicks the nearest speaker in with his boot, bringing the volume down to half measure.

“ _Timothy Gutterson of the 75th Ranger Regiment of the United States Armed Forces, please make your location known_ ,” Boyd says into the microphone, echoing out to the waves. “ _And maybe I will forgive you for dragging me on the most gunplay-heavy vacation of my life._ ”

“What the fuck?” The DJ asks as the crowd clamors, spins in confusion. Raylan sighs, flashes his badge. 

“The US Marshals thanks you for your service.”

“Boyd?” A voice breaks out of the crowd. "Boyd!" Tim looks significantly more sweaty and drunk than when they left him on Adi’s porch, a reddish hickey forming on the side of his neck. His eyes, though, seem alert. “White button-up, heading west.” 

Boyd shoots off the stage like a bullet, eyes catching a figure rapidly changing direction at Tim’s words. Raylan feels a tug on this belt loop, knows before his hand makes it down that he’s run off with his Glock, too. 

“Goddamn it,” he mutters under his breath, but he doesn’t take off. He watches the pursuit, Boyd running Adi away from the road, from escape. When they’re knee deep in the lapping waves, Raylan jumps onto the sand and sanuters over.

It’s good to be back in his element.

* * *

The ocean soaks through Boyd’s jeans, fills his boots and makes him sink a few inches into the muck. Adi stops running, turns to face him, back to the horizon. The water makes his linen pants turn see-through against his legs.

He almost looks bored. Boyd cocks Raylan’s gun.

“They already got your sister.” Salt in the air, stinging his eyes. “But I think I’ve earned the pleasure to personally send you to your reward down in hell.”

Adi rolls his eyes. “You are not lawman. You can’t shoot me in front of all these people.”

“How do you know I ain’t?” He doesn’t mean to ask the question behind the words, _why did you try to get me?,_ but it comes out in the low notes of his tone. 

Adi clicks his tongue. “You are scientist. You told me, very proud. You are like lots of the girls who come to us. You think you are better than, ah, Alabama?"

" _Kentucky_."

"So you run away. But you are still left with you. Those eyes...men like you are not...” he found the phrase. “The good guys.”

A loud sloshing sound grew louder behind them. Someone's running through the surf. “What took you so long?” 

“Figured you had a minute or two of monologuing in you,” Raylan replies, holding his hat on as it flaps in the wind. “You could’ve asked for the gun, y’know.”

“Could we push pause on this conversation, Raylan?” Boyd says. “Mr. Kowak here was telling me about the unbearable torment of being me.”

Adi’s eyes narrow, then widen as he laughs. “The lawman uses you as bait? Why? He’s the pretty one.”

Boyd shoots Adi in the shoulder. He cries out, stumbles and falls to his knees in the ocean. “I’m pretty enough for you to dope up. It ain’t really that hard to get me to put out in the first place, is it Raylan?”

The water is turning red around them. Raylan works his jaw, holds out his hand. “Give that here, Boyd.”

_He reached for Ava’s hand after he took the last shot, right through the bridge of Bowman’s nose, but she backed away._

_“Gonna get gunpowder residue on us both,” she murmured. “I’ll get the tarp, then we gotta wash up.”_

_“Baby–”_

_She shook her head, voice cracking. “I know you had to.”_

_They took a shower together, just down the hall from where Bowman was bundled up. He washed the powder out of her hair, watched as the blood swirled down the drain._

_His brother left bruises fast turning purple up and down her face. She tilted her chin up and stared directly into the spray._

_”We can’t keep on pretending like we can be normal,” she said. “Tonight proves that.”_

_Boyd could feel himself starting to cry. Normally he didn’t have reservations doing that in front of Ava, she knew he wore his heart on both sleeves, that his daddy used to say he had the soul of a poet._

_But he knew, even before they loaded the body into her truck and road to the marsh, before she kissed him through her own tears and kept on driving north once it was empty, that he’d lost her. Lost normal. And that was worth mourning._

Boyd takes another shot, aimless, into the water. Raylan wraps his arms around his waist and pulls him back with too much force, and they both tumble over, sputtering salt water. Boyd kept a hold on the gun, even as he fell against Raylan’s chest and bashed and elbow into his cheek. 

“Thought you said I could have it,” he said. Raylan coughed and pushed himself up on his elbows, jeans and button-up soaked through. If Boyd was going inside for this, it wasn't a bad final view of the free world. Adi swears loudly, struggling to rise again.

“Said you could _ask_.” Raylan catches the barrel of the gun, closed his fist around it. “You hit him in the right spot, that’s a place you ain’t coming back from.”

Boyd shakes his head. Water droplets were falling from the tips of his hair. “Maybe I’ve always been in that place.”

Raylan doesn’t smile, but his eyes crinkle. “Nah. You’re going to Mars, darlin’.” 

He presses a hard kiss to Boyd’s lips, and the moment the muscles in his wrist flex, he wrests the gun away. Boyd seems to be expecting this, though, and pulls the heavy letter opener out of his boot, lunging forward and stabbing Adi in the side of the neck with it.

“Stay down,” he commands.

* * *

The Marshals come. The police come. Every single person who hadn’t bolted when they heard the gunshots or gotten too crossfaded to function is interviewed. Rachel leads Adi away in handcuffs, neck soaked in blood. Boyd sits on the edge of the dry sand with Tim, the waves licking his feet as day breaks.

He checks over his shoulder a few times, watches Raylan in a squinty-eyed battle of wills with Art. 

“You gotta get out of those clothes,” Tim tells him. “I have all your shit in my car still, wanna go grab it?”

Boyd scratches the wet bandage around his gunshot wound, peeling from his leg. He’s not crazy about all the bacteria and ocean microbes currently feasting on it. “Yes. Thank you for offering.”

Tim raises an eyebrow, pushes himself up. “You’re just gonna wait here?” 

Boyd inclines his head. Tim looks back up the beach, where Raylan is grumbling about something to Rachel, hands on his hips.

“You and the cowboy got here pretty fast, huh?” Tim says slowly, tongue-in-cheek. 

“Time _was_ of the essence.”

“Showed up together. Almost like you’d been together all night.” He’s grinning now, and that threat of blushing still doesn’t actually boil over on Boyd’s face, but it’s close. 

“You should quit Canaveral, Timothy, become a private eye. Maybe we’ll get lucky and some mobster will shoot you.”

“I got you _laid_. I forced you out of your cave of heterosexual moping and got you laid. You’re _welcome_.” Raylan starts down the beach towards them, and Tim mercifully backs away, whistling through his teeth. “Goddamn. I don’t know how, but you only attract 10s, Crowder.”

Boyd gives him a withering glance that does nothing to diminish Tim’s smirk. 

“Morning,” Raylan actually touches the brim of his hat in greeting. “Didn’t mean to run you off.”

“No, nothing like that. Just gonna grab our boy some new clothes.” Walking backwards, he mouths _if you’re even gonna need any._

Raylan notices none of this. He sits down just inches from Boyd’s side, propped up on his elbows.

“You did good today. Marshals Service was doubtful we’d get one Kowak, let alone two.”

“You ain’t in trouble for all the gunfire it took to reach that happy conclusion?” Boyd asks. Raylan chuckles.

“Think that DJ is mighty pissed with the destruction of his sound system, but personally I think you did a service to humanity.” Boyd smiles, but it feels tight, like he’s stretching the muscles to a tearing point. “You need something? We can get the EMTs to look you over again.”

The sun is bursting over the ocean now, in brilliant, dazzling beams, It’s going to be another beautiful day. “I believe I’ve had enough medical intervention from Miami emergency services for the remainder of eternity.”

“Eternity, huh? Very broad statement.” Raylan says. “Then again, you ain’t a man who lives his life in half-measures.”

“No, I am not.” Boyd agrees.

“I had Deputy Brooks call down to Harlan. She said nobody’s heard from your brother in a real long time.”

They both sit sprawled in the sand, not looking at anything much. For once, Boyd doesn’t feel the need to talk. No need to cop to something they both already know. 

Raylan finally breaks the silence. “I ain’t gonna say anything to anyone.”

Boyd doesn’t move a muscle. “You afraid that if you cause trouble for me, I’ll tell everyone we went to bed together?”

“You really think so little of your own abilities that’s something that’d embarrass me?” Raylan smirks. When Boyd doesn’t react, expression hard, Raylan’s turns serious too. “Bowman was a wife-beating asshole. Think you were justified.” 

Boyd nods. He tastes iron again, but realizes it’s not in his head, not the ghost of his brother. He’s biting his own cheek hard enough to draw blood. 

Raylan must be able to tell by the face he pulls, because he claps a hand on Boyd’s kneecap, rubs his thumb back and forth against the fabric of his jeans. “Easy now. It’s okay.”

There are tears in his eyes, and he swipes them away quickly with his thumb and forefinger. “I ain’t sorry I did it. Just sorry for what it did to me.”

Raylan nods, sidles a little closer, shoulder's rubbing. “That from something? Who said that?”

“Boyd Crowder.”

Raylan laughs, and he feels himself laughing a little too. He’s so tired, bordering on hysterical. “Only changes you if you let it. Didn’t take out Adi today, and he deserves just as much.”

Boyd shrugs. “I stabbed him with office supplies.”

“Not fatally,” Raylan murmurs, and plants a gentle kiss on his cheek to punctuate the sentence. “You made a different choice. Just have to take them one at a time."

"Sounds simple when you put it like that."

"I'm only saying you ain't gotta make some sweeping statement about your inherent evil. Learn a little small talk." A wave rides up higher than the last, washing the sand from their boots. "From where I'm sitting, you're fixing to be something amazing in this life." 

Boyd turns and watches the light catch on Raylan’s face, the face that made his stomach drop at seventeen and grew even more handsome as it became a man’s. The sun made him look holy.

This could be a mistake. He can already see the path this leads down, loving Raylan so much it’s dangerous, not just because he’s a lawman and Boyd’s done enough time in juvie and military prison to read his own rights backwards and in Spanish. Because Boyd will blow himself up rather than lose what’s important to him, even if the blast takes them down too.

But.

NASA plans for every eventuality. They sent Sally Ride into space with 100 tampons for seven days. They picked pilots who could manually recalculate their trajectories with soap marks on the window of their spaceship. They hire men like Boyd Crowder who not only come up with Plan B, but Plans C through Z and appendixes for each of those.

Maybe it’s time for a new plan of action, a new design for being Boyd Crowder.

“You know, Orlando is only a few hours from Miami,” he says.

“Is it now?” Raylan murmurs.

“Just a quick drive up the interstate. You strike me as a man who doesn’t mind a little alone time.” Boyd leans into him, and he feels solid, warm. An immovable object rising up to meet an unstoppable force.

Raylan takes his hat off, leans in. “Seem to recall you were tired of half of Harlan County knocking on your door.” 

“Let ‘em. We can tell them all about how I swooped in and valiantly saved you from a crazed Polish woman.” He grins, and it doesn’t hurt so much this time.

“Perfect. I’ll tell ‘em all about how I knocked you flat on your ass in the shallow end.”

“Well now Raylan, if we really want to be divulging who did what to whose ass–” Raylan slaps his cheek lightly and kisses him. Boyd stops talking.

The sun is coming up.


End file.
